Robots can do romance!

You can't trust data or people these days

This post was supposed to be part 2 of our findings on an analysis of AI in creative writing. It seemed pretty straightforward until I read an article in Futurism yesterday.

To begin….
A romance genre related finding, based on crunching manuscript submissions data told us that romance authors used AI less and liked to refine/complete their manuscripts manually. We concluded that it was due to the obligation to deliver emotional authenticity and nuanced character arcs. AI is lousy at conveying and then sustaining emotional content.

And then I read a headline in Futurism magazine.Romance authors Lena McDonald left verbatim chatbot output in her novel ‘Darkhollow Academy: Year 2’.

"I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements."

Not only did she lean into gen AI, she asked it to copy a fellow author’s writing style – the very sin that launched copyright cases in courtrooms all over the world. Reddit was outraged.

However, earlier in the year, another prolific romance author, KC Crowne was also caught with chatbot output:
“Certainly! Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori."

In KC Crowne’s case, her readers are still lapping it up. She’s published over a hundred books, sells a ton, and has a 4.25 goodreads rating.

I would hazard to guess that in McDonald’s case, readers were outraged that she was caught red handed stealing from a fellow author, and they won’t tolerate it. In Crowne’s case, readers see that she’s clearly using gen AI as a co-pilot to write faster and better than she believes she can on her own. And they don’t seem to mind, as long as the books are enjoyable.

Based on our research, we still believe that romance authors shouldn’t delegate their character personalities and journeys to LLMs. However, fans of KC Crowne beg to differ. Maybe one can’t generalize even across a single genre We’ll have to dig deeper.